Wednesday, July 3, 2013

News we kinda knew already

...I didn’t much enjoy being a teenager. In addition to
being lumpy in all the wrong places and covered in what I thought were
unseemly freckles, I felt deeply unfeminine. I resented other girls for
appearing to have it so easy. They had the kinds of slim legs and
delicate features which lead to party invitations, which lead to kisses,
which lead inevitably to boyfriends and thus everlasting happiness. (My
understanding of how the working model of high school romance clearly
came Fed Exed direct from Hollywood.) I had thick calves, a succession
of terrible haircuts and no boyfriends. Worse, I had no prospect of getting
a boyfriend...

7 comments:

When the most recent wave of feminism started with Betty Friedan and her book The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she struck a chord amongst normal women. They had a justifiable grievance with the barriers on women. When "the movement" took off amongst the mass of women with Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch things changed and much of that change was worthwhile. But the useful change was finished by the early '80s. And normal women lost interest in feminism.

Since then there have been two types of feminist keeping the flag flying. Those who like men but resent that men don't like them. They make that resentment known. And those who like women and don't give a rat's about men and are indifferent to the fact that most women do care about men and want to get on with them. So ... men despise the first kind and women despise the second kind. It's hard to see where Clementine fits. She's one really mixed up girly-boyly-girl. Thirty and still writing like a confused pubescent.

Prof, Spinal Tap and the Rockumentary makers have already covered this: "What's the difference between sexist and sexy?"All the confected outrage/ hypocrisy/ shallow disdain/ sniffing at the piquant.Meanwhile Syrian towel heads shouting Allah hu akbar have the bloody red teeth of raw human flesh on their breath, in their manic smiles and glazed Islamic stares. And our today's Prime Minister once said we must engage the same Muslim Brotherhood the Egyptian Army dismisses for a six. Hopefully a Junta can capture the sane middle ground Western politicians have totally abandoned.

All fucking hypocrites. Jesus is who He said He is, is still, not mocked.

Discovered Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale, while you were gone Prof; you really should put him on your watch list. cheers

Having read the full article, it is differcult to work out exactly what her point is.

What is Clem actually on about? Is she telling that she is really a feminist because she couldn't get a boyfriend since all the 'perfect' girls stole them from her?

That you can't be a happy girl teen without a boyfriend?

But none of that matters because being a girl is bad and the trick to being a happy girl is to not be a girl at all?

Clem reminds me of the girls I sometimes run into in life who seem to react to not being in the 'cool' social circle by lashing out scorn at everyone else they meet.

One would hear them discuss the previous night out, "this guy came up and tried to talk to us and we just paid the s*** out of him! It was so funny!"

Seems there is some justification that if you preceive yourself to be unpopular you can make up for it by not taking s*** from anyone, or, to describe it as an outsider sees it, being pointlessly rude to everyone you meet.

Sorry, kids, sometimes people are cruel and rude, and then sometimes those cruel, rude people are YOU. That laughter you can hear as you insult the harmless person who actually just wanted to meet you is the sound of laughing at you, not with.

Oh Prof, I am all of a-twitter. There is such a truth in the cold hard facts of life. Clementine's words have shaken and stirred something in me. I don't know about party invitations (they didn't go in for those much around Boganville where I grew up) but the memory of those pre-sixteen kisses is with me still and will be so forever. After sixteen, well, I slowly learned how to manage things. In a few years I had clawed my way alone into the wealthy world of partyland and the invites rolled in. They weren't to school formals though and they didn't arrive because I was ugly. At first it mattered little that I was smart, but then cultured men started to pay attention to the smarts as well. Which eventually changed me into someone they wanted to marry.

Without beauty (oh those old photos, Prof, I really did have a fragile oval face and swan-necked loveliness; alabaster skin, a wide blue-eyed gaze and a body that flowered) I might have worked in a factory and married a tyre-repairer, and thought myself happy and lucky. If that sounds too self-serving about my looks, I can only plead that I view my much younger self with some distance and with sadness now.

Beauty is opportunity, but only really useful if you have the wits to take what it offers and not get lost along the way; it is a two-edged sword that can thrill one into hubris and peril. This may not be consolation to the less beautiful. If you have lots of wits but not much beauty, you face the sad fact that the path to love will be harder, but with ingenuity it can still be trod with success, as many fascinating if less attractive women have shown. For a start, I offer Mrs. Wallace Simpson (although I do wonder if she actually ever did find her true heart's desire).

If you have neither beauty nor wits in abundance, and have no impetus to questing forays, but do have the advantage of being born into relative middle class privilege, you may end up writing for Fairfax and moaning about your lot.